China's top security official has warned of a new crackdown on "separatism" in the remote north-western region of Xinjiang.

Some Uighurs resent an influx of Chinese settlers to the region

The warning came ahead of ceremonies planned for 1 October to mark half-a-century of Chinese control.

Luo Gan said officers should remain "prepared for danger".

Xinjiang is home to a large population of Muslim Uighurs, some of whom want an independent homeland in the region they call East Turkestan.

Many resent the recent and large-scale influx into the region of Han Chinese settlers, though there have been few reports of violence.

CHINA'S UIGHURS

Ethnically Turkic Muslims, mainly in Xinjiang

Made bid for independent state in 1940s

Sporadic violence in Xinjiang since 1991

Uighurs worried about Chinese immigration and erosion of traditional culture

China brands the separatists as terrorists and said earlier this month that more than 260 terrorist acts had been committed in Xinjiang in the past two decades.

Mr Luo said the general situation in Xinjiang was very good, according to the China Daily, but he called on officials at all levels to "be prepared for danger in times of safety".

The authorities last month accused a prominent Uighur businesswoman-turned-activist, Rebiya Kadeer, who was recently freed from jail under intense international pressure, of planning to sabotage the forthcoming ceremonies.

I was in Xinjiang as a solo traveller in 1990. I dislike the Islamic world intensely, but by and large found the Uighurs to be a very decent set of people.

The Chinese settlers in Xinjiang, OTOH, treated the Uighurs horribly. The Chinese don't belong out there, any more than they belong in Tibet, and if they would leave the Uighurs alone, the Muslim extremists would have very little to recruit.

Extremely interesting. Al Queda has been sending recruiting agents into this very unpleasant looking place It sounds like Communist propaganda to me to justify their imperialism and illegal take over of another country called East Turkistan.

In our 15 years of experience inside China, we had students and many friends from Xinjiang Province. The influence of the Han Chinese (the majority in China) is obviously very effective in the western region. The students we had who were from Xinjiang were ALL actually more proficient in Mandarin (dialect) than many Beijingren (people from Beijing) among our students. The purest Mandarin is spoken between Beijing and Harbin City (Heilongjiang Province). Our students who came from Xinjiang also seemed to be the most adept in history.

But we never remember our students who were from Xinjiang Province speak anything about the Muslim population or about Islam at all. We know that Xinjiang Anhui (north-central China) is an autonomous region and has a very high population of Muslims. We were often warned not to travel there as "the Muslims there are very treacherous."

It seems to me that the problem of what to do with all those Han whose creation Mao encouraged is becoming more and more important. Their encroachment into Siberia and their migration into Tibet and apparently Xinjiang appear to all be manifestations of this. Sort of a slow-motion conquest that presumably won't be tolerated by those at the receiving end forever.

Agreed. In the mid-1990's my father in law's employer was hired by the Chinese govt to write up the project costs and requirements to connect parts of western China to Beijing via fiber. Politics eventually killed the project, but not before my FIL, a half dozen engineers, and I (I worked with him at the time), got to spend a couple of weeks in China.

For the most part, the Uighurs seemed to be a kind people, and visiting towns with an Uighur majority seemed like stepping back in time. They weren't fundamentalist by any means, and were genuinely friendly. They do NOT like the Hans, on the other hand, and we had more than one set of doors slammed in our faces when people learned that we were there on the Han's business.

The problem is the Chinese opinions of the Uighurs. Xinjiang translates literally to "New Frontier", and the Chinese government treats the entire area as empty land waiting to be settled. If they decide to build a city in some location and sent in a million Han, they don't even bother to check and see if there are already Uighur towns or farms there. The Chinese treat the Uighurs much the same way American's treated the Indians back in the 1800's...if they're in the way, they simply get driven off at gunpoint.

It's no surprise that some Uighurs are becoming militant towards the Chinese. These people have lived there for thousands of years and have a long history in the area. They have been intermittently been subject to Chinese rule for more than 1400 years, but have mostly accepted it since the Chinese left them alone (as long as they paid their taxes and didn't rebel, the Chinese emperors mostly left them alone). The policy since 1950, however, has been simple. Drive out the Uighur. Ban their culture, destroy their farms, and replace them demographically with Han Chinese. The Han have gone from only a few thousand people 50 years ago, to nearly half the population today...and ever one of them live on Uighur land that was taken without compensation.

I don't like the Chinese, and I don't like Muslims, but in this particular case I'm rooting for the Muslims. Nobody deserves to have their homes and culture destroyed on a political whim.

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